The latest scientific research and publications news.
The Met Office has released a report detailing how the changing climate has affected weather extremes in the UK from 1961 – 2017. By documenting periods of extremely warm, cold, dry and wet weather they have mapped how extreme conditions have changed between 1961 – 1990 and 2008 – 2017.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opened a meeting on October 1st 2018 in Incheon, South Korea to discuss the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. Governments requested a report from the IPCC on the effects warming by 1.5°C would have in order to help them address climate change. 195 IPCC members’ governments and IPCC scientists will meet this week to finalise the Summary for Policymakers of the report.
Antibiotics are widely used in both animals and humans to treat bacterial infection. This use (and often overuse) has caused bacteria to evolve and develop resistances against the treatment, posing great risks for human health globally.
The warm, saline waters of the Gulf Stream meander northeasterly across the Atlantic Ocean, eventually forming the North Atlantic Current. During winter, these salty waters cool and descend – it is this deep convection that is a key part of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the ocean conveyor belt. This conveyor belt is essential for heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere - it releases heat into the atmosphere above the North Atlantic Ocean then travels through the ocean, resurfacing in other areas of the world.
Research published in Geophysical Research Letters has used direct satellite observations of the ozone hole to show that levels of ozone-destroying chlorine are declining, resulting in less ozone depletion.
Climate change is not just occurring at ground level, but also high up in the atmosphere – and it will have significant impacts on air travel. One of the ways in which it can impact air travel is by increasing the strength and incidence of clean-air turbulence (CAT), one of the leading causes of weather-related aviation incidents.
A recent study by NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and University of Toronto indicates that updrafts are more important than previously thought in determining whether clouds produce drizzle rather than larger-sized raindrops. Such findings will help improve the accuracy of model predictions of rainfall, a challenge for both short-term weather forecasting and longer-term climate projections.
Over the past 35 years extreme storms in the Sahel have tripled and it’s down to global warming, according to research conducted by NERC scientists at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. In such storms, clouds can grow to heights of 16 km and can produce substantial volumes of rainfall. Indeed, in 2009 one downpour deposited 263 mm of rainfall in several hours and forced 150,000 residents of Burkina Faso to leave their homes.
The last few years have seen several rainfall events cause widespread flooding in the UK, such as the extensive flooding in winter 2013/14 when the heaviest rainfall in 100 years fell in southern England and the Midlands, and flooding in the north-west as a result of Storm Desmond in December 2015.
Clouds aren’t typically associated with ice lollies, but rather sunshine – until now. Researchers from Manchester University have found ice lolly-shaped icicles in cloud systems over the UK and the North Atlantic.
The ice formations – which are the shape of a stick attached to a large spherical head – were found in large concentrations during a research flight over the northeast Atlantic Ocean in 2016, and previously in southwest UK in 2009.
